“Number of private U.S. citizens killed in terrorist attacks in 2010: 15. Number killed by falling televisions: 16.” (“Harper’s Index,” August 2012, p. 9). Yet our warrior leaders and their war-monger supporters have produced two full-scale “anti-terror” wars (and three small-scale invasions) to defend “America” and “freedom” at the price of trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of innocent people. In my 10 newsletters on the “War on Terror” plenty of evidence supports the idea of a War on Falling Televisions! However, it always was a War OF Terror.

“Of all the enemies to
public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises
and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . .” James Madison, “Political
Observations,” April 20, 1795.

Or
: INSTEAD OF A WAR ON TERRORISM LET’S DECLARE WAR ON IGNORANCE, WAR ON
HATRED, WAR ON KILLING, OR BETTER: A
PEACE ON TERRORISM, PEACE ON IGNORANCE, PEACE ON HATRED, PEACE ON KILLING.

Petition for Peace:

I just signed the petition "The US
President and US Congress: End wars and the attack on our civil liberties here
in the US"
on Change.org.

Post-9/11 Authorization
for the Use of Military Force and Permanent War

Gregory D.
Johnsen wrote, "Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that Congress didn't
think about how the war would end when it passed the AUMF on Sept. 14, 2001,
but after more than a dozen years, we are no closer to an answer." (photo:
unknown)

Required Reading

By Charles Pierce, Esquire, RSN, 19 January 14

f you read nothing else this weekend, read Gregory Johnsen'ssomewhat epic performanceon
Buzzfeed about the original Authorization for the Use of Military Force that
came out of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the permanent state of war
that one 60-word sentence in that document created in the United States, a
phenomenon that the Founders specifically and repeatedly warned against.
(Johnsen is the recipient of first Michael Hastings Fellowship, named for the
renowned journalist who died in an automobile accident last year.) If nothing
else, the piece functions as a very loud warning
siren against upending the rule of law and the separation of powers out of
fear and panic. War, Mr. Madison cautioned, is "the true nurse of
executive aggrandizement." We have traded his wisdom for the undying
partisan hackery of apparatchiks like David Addington and John Yoo. It is not a
good trade.

Unbound by time and unlimited by geography, the
sentence has been stretched and expanded over the past decade, sprouting new
meanings and interpretations as two successive administrations have each
attempted to keep pace with an evolving threat while simultaneously maintaining
the security of the homeland. In the process, what was initially thought to authorize force against al-Qaeda and the
Taliban in Afghanistan has now been used to justify operations in several
countries across multiple continents and, at least theoretically, could allow
the president - any president - to strike anywhere at anytime. What was written
in a few days of fear has now come to govern years of action.

The piece goes on to illustrate with painful clarity a meek and
timorous Congress, which had allowed so much of its constitutional war powers
to leach into the executive over the previous five decades that most of its
members had forgotten how to exercise them at all, let alone how to exercise
them at a moment of national trauma. (One pissant aide to a forgettable schlub
like Dennis Hastert gets to bulldoze past legitimate constitutional questions
because we...must...do...something, and everybody acclaims him a hero.)
Congress -- in the persons of Joe Biden and John Kerry, among others -- tries
to cover its ass but ends up taking what everybody knows is a dive. And, after
the dive, we see Yoo, who should have been kept away from the councils of
government for the same reason we keep Charlie Manson out of the cutlery,
immediately find a way to renege on a deal that had been cut with the Congress
and expand the president's power beyond anything remotely conceived of in the
Constitution.

Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising that
Congress didn't think about how the war would end when it passed the AUMF on
Sept. 14, 2001, but after more than a dozen years, we are no closer to an
answer. "This is a bizarro war," Jack Goldsmith told me recently. A
tenured law professor at Harvard who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel
under George W. Bush, Goldsmith has written a pair of books on national
security law. "What we don't see, we don't care about."

Read the whole thing and understand how we got to where we are
today, when the president is going to deliver a speech about the NSA
revelations, arguing for "reforms" in which there is no good reason
to believe. Read the whole thing and see in it the seedbed for unlimited drone
warfare and whatever comes after that, which undoubtedly will be worse. Read
the whole thing and understand how Abu Ghraib happened and why Gitmo is still
open. Read the whole thing and watch the relentless abandonment of
self-government over the past 13 years. Read the whole thing and realize that
we are no longer even the nation we pretend to be, Read the whole thing and realize how much the late Osama bin Laden
actually won.

Dear Dick Bennett,

I’ve spent much of the last month in Capitol Hill offices
talking about the 2001 law that authorized the war in Afghanistan, expanding armed drone attacks,
NSA spying and indefinite detention at GuantanamoBay.
In office after office, from Republicans and Democrats,I’ve heard staffers saying their boss would be open to repeal of this
sweeping law.But
staff report they need to hear more from their constituents to make this a
priority.

With your help we’re hoping to organize at least 3,000
messages into congressional offices asking for repeal.Please
email your representative todaywith the message that as the U.S. ends its military involvement in Afghanistan,
our country also ought to repeal the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that authorized
that war and so much more. Last year we had 185 votes in favor of repeal –
just 33 short of the total we need to win passage in the House.

But congressional offices say they need constituent support to
vote confidently for repeal. And right now they aren’t hearing enough from
their constituents. Your representatives are back home this week for the
Presidents Day recess.

We’ve spent the past four months organizing delegations to
lobby in person during this week, bringing the message in person to
influential representatives that it’s time to end the state of endless war
that the authorization allows. You also have an important part to play in
getting this message into offices. Please write to your representative today,
then forward this email to 3 friends and ask them to write as well. Help get
to 3,000 messages.Make
sure your representative hears this week that it’s time for the endless war
to end.

You can help end the endless war.Please join my colleagues Elizabeth Beavers and Jim Cason for
a lively conference call tomorrow night at 8 p.m. to learn more about FCNL’s work and what you
can do in your community.

The American people
and our Congress are asking hard questions about the idea and practice of
“permanent war” that has shaped U.S. policy since 9/11. In the
past months, the Senate has rejected new sanctions that would undermine Iran diplomacy, Congress has refused to
endorse military action in Syria,
and the Pentagon budget has been cut.

But the law that
provides the legal underpinnings for drone strikes, detentions at GuantanamoBay,
government surveillance, and the war Afghanistan remains on the books.Unless Congress acts, this sweeping law – the
Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) – will continue to be used
to justify a U.S.
policy based on permanent war.

FCNL is working
diligently alongside others here in Washington
to convince Congress to repeal this law and bring this dark chapter of our
country’s history to a close. But to achieve the ambitious goal of repealing
this law,we need
your help.

Here’s what you can
do now:

1. Join FCNL’s call tomorrow night

Please RSVP toforeignpolicy@fcnl.orgif you plan to join the call. Then on February 5 at 8 p.m., call 1-213-342-3000 and enter access code
86511.

We see an excellent opportunity to repeal the AUMF and end the
authority Congress created for endless war. Last year, 185
representatives—just 33 shy of the number needed for a bill to pass—voted to
repeal the AUMF. With your help, this year we can and will persuade 33
additional members of the House to support this legislation when it comes to
a vote again this summer.

Argues that conservative policies, including overseas
interventions, have undermined the bundle of beliefs called American
exceptionalism., [Sent to me by HAW.]

FOCUS: Robert Scheer.
“The Super Bowl of War: Three Decades of Failure in Afghanistan.”Robert
Scheer, Truthdig, Reader Response News, Feb. 4,
2014Scheer
writes: "... you would have to be drunk on Bud not to notice that the
three decades since the United States first meddled in Afghanistan have been an
unequivocal disaster and that those who did not survive - NATO combatants and
far larger number of Afghan natives - died in vain."READ MORE

Kane
reports: "Today, the 33-year-old Hashmi remains under solitary confinement
at the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) near Florence, Colorado,
a maximum security federal prison. In total, he's toiled under the harsh
confines of solitary confinement for six years, doing untold damage to his
mental health."READ MORE

William
Boardman, “American Terrorists on Both
Sides of War”

Reader Supported News, Feb. 14, 2014Boardman writes:
"You're not supposed to know the U.S. kills civilians. You're not
supposed to think of your own country as a state sponsor of terrorism."READ MORE

AHMED QADRI SENTENCED TO DEATH BY YEMENI COURT

Our leaders claim the purity of the rule
of law and denigrate other nations’ lawlessness. Yet Yemen proves the opposite. Ahmed Qadri, “an al-Qaida militant,” was
sentenced to death by a Yemeni security court for “taking part in a 2010
bombing that killed a dozen soldiers at an intelligence facility in Aden.” That is what civilized nations do against
murderers: you go to court with the evidence and you prosecute and punish. Yemen, one of
the poorest and most primitive and reportedly lawless countries in the world,
follows its judicial system in the prosecution of even mass murderers.

In contrast, the US executes suspected
murderers or persons suspected of planning murder, surely an abhorrent example
of extreme lawlessness. Yet this
degraded, extremist behavior is
practiced by the president of the United States
in his drone assassinations, who is supposed to be a model for the “rule of
law” USA.Dwight
Eisenhower denounced “preventive war.”
That’s what Hitler espoused and justified. But for Eisenhower, “I wouldn’t even listen
to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.” Surely Eisenhower would say the same about
presidential “preventive murder.” --Dick

Book Description

Publication Date:September 27, 2010Named
one of the Washington Post Book World's Best Books of 2009, The Least Worst
Place offers a gripping narrative account of the first one hundred days of Guantanamo. Greenberg,
one of America's leading
experts on the Bush Administration's policies on terrorism, tells the story through a group of career
officers who tried-and ultimately failed-to stymie the Pentagon's desire to implement harsh new policies
in Guantanamo and bypass the Geneva Conventions. Peopled with genuine heroes and villains,
this narrative of the earliest days of the post-9/11 era centers on the
conflicts between Gitmo-based Marine officers intent on upholding the Geneva
Accords and an intelligence unit set up under the Pentagon's aegis. The latter
ultimately won out, replacing transparency with secrecy, military protocol with
violations of basic operation procedures, and humane and legal detainee
treatment with harsh interrogation methods and torture. Greenberg's riveting
account puts a human face on this little-known story, revealing how America first
lost its moral bearings in the wake of 9/11.

MOAZZAM BEGG

Moazzam Begg Arrest: Criminalizing Muslim Political
Dissent. Glenn
Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, First Look, Reader Supported News, Feb. 28, 2014Greenwald and Hussain
write: "Moazzam Begg, a native-born British citizen of Pakistani descent,
spent three years incarcerated in the most notorious detention camps created in
the post-9/11 'War on Terror': all without ever being charged with any
crime."READ MORE

John
Leonard. “MachoSecurityState.” New
York Times Book Review (Oct. 14, 2007).
“Susan Faludi says that since
9//, we’ve been urged to revert to mythic notions of gender roles. . .
.confabulated by our government ministers and news media heavies, a ‘security
myth’ and a ‘national fantasy’ starring John Wayne and Dirty Harry as the Last
of the Mohicans.” “We’ve sleepwalked
into hallucination, regression, and psychosis….of a celebrity/media culture and
national security state that honors men more as warriors, actors, cowboys,
athletes and killers than for skilled labor, company loyalty, civic duty,
steadfast fatherhood, homesteading, caretaking and community-building. . . .”

Contact Arkansas Congressional Delegation

Arkansas is represented in
Congress by two senators and four representatives. Here is how to reach them.
None of the senators or representatives publishes his e-mail address, but each
can be contacted by filling in forms offered through his website.